2009 -2010 Special Topics and 4th Year seminar Courses

English Special Topics and 4th Year Seminar Courses 2009-2010

Special Topics Courses (Open to all students):

Note that students can earn credit for multiple sections of English 3817 and 3911, so long as the sections have different titles.

English 3817FA: Special Topics in Creative Writing "Creative Nonfiction."(Susan Goldberg)
In the course, we will discuss and study creative nonfiction in its various genres, including memoir, the personal essay, "life writing," and newer technologies such as blogging and Twitter. Students will be expected to create and maintain their own blogs, as well as write in the various genres we discuss. We will workshop student work as a group and in small groups, and discuss the art and craft of giving feedback and constructive editorial suggestions.

English 3911FA: Special Topics: Food, Writing, and Community. (Scott Pound)
This course provides advanced writing instruction and experience in a community service learning format focussed on Food Security. Students will work in groups with an interested community partner to offer writing support: first auditing existing discourse (advertising, promotions, mission statement, web, public relations, advocacy) and then working with the partner to create and implement a communications/writing plan. As part of the course, students will get hands-on training in a variety modes and genres of writing. Successful completion of the course will provide students with advanced rhetorical skills which they can use to succeed academically and to participate in their communities. Students will also learn how to conduct community-based research, contribute to community initiatives and activities, and to negotiate and participate in a range of discourse communities beyond the academy.  This course can count toward the minor in writing

English 3911FDE: Myth as the Structure of Literature (Susan Tiura)

(description coming soon)

Fourth Year Seminars (Open ONLY to Hons. English Students)

Note that students can earn credit for multiple sections of English 4010, 4011, 4914 and 4916, so long as the sections have different titles.  While Hons. students are only required to take 1FCE of 4th year English, taking more will better prepare students for graduate school or teaching careers. 

Students contemplating graduate work in English are encouraged to take at least one section of 4914 or 4916 (the 4th year theory seminars)

English 4010FA: Julian Barnes (Rick Holmes)
(description coming soon)

English 4010FB: Medieval Scottish Poetry–The Scots Makars (Douglas Hayes)
This seminar will focus on the poetry of the Scots Makars, a somewhat disparate group of poets from 15th and 16th-century Scotland who, beginning in the 18th century, have been taken to represent the “Golden Age” of Scottish literature.  Indeed, even today their work is widely read and discussed in terms of Scottish identity, culture, and national independence, and the language of their poetry, “Inglis” in their own term and “Middle Scots” from a modern scholarly perspective, has often been at the centre of these discussions.  We will read selected works from King James I of Scotland, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas in an effort to see their work both within its own literary and cultural context and that which has grown up
around it in the centuries since.

English 4010FC: Postcolonial Women’s Literature (Anna Guttman)
This course will focus on contemporary literature in a variety of genres (fiction, drama, poetry) by women of African, Caribbean and South Asian heritage.  As we examine these diverse texts, we will grapple with a number of questions.  What is the relationship between these texts and the canon of English literature?  What challenges and rewards come with studying texts decidedly outside the literary canon?  How is gender and its articulation culturally-specific?  Can women relate to one another as women across cultures?  If so, how?  Our study of primary texts will be supplemented with readings in feminist, postcolonial and critical race theories. 

English 4916 FA – Sex, Gender, and the Body (R. Warburton)
This course will be organized around several modules and will examine both theoretical and cultural texts to explore the manifold ways in which texts represent and destabilize bodies and genders. Topics may include: cross-dressing, trans-theory, cyborgs & embodied technologies, performance, body modification, the grotesque body, écriture féminine, dis-ease, sex work and porn, cosmetic surgery, the Hottentot Venus, pumping iron, and so on. Possible literary/cultural texts include Written on the Body, Middlesex, Orlando, Ivan Coyote’s stories, and photographs by Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. Theoretical readings will include: Foucault’s History of Sexuality, articles by Rubin, Rich, Butler, Sedgwick, Marjorie Garber, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Cheryl Chase, Naomi Scheman, Sander Gilman, and others.

English 4011WA: Restoration and 18th Century Drama (Christopher Parkes)
(description coming soon)

English 4011WB: Christopher Marlowe (Michael Richardson)
(description coming soon)

English 4011WC Tudor Bibles (Douglas Hayes)
The Tudor period (1485-1603) in Britain gave rise to an explosion of interest in English translations of the Bible.  Far from being the exclusive concern of theologians and Church reformers, vernacular translations of the Bible were at the centre of cultural, ideological,
political and religious controversy throughout the period, and it is difficult to understand much of the history and literature of sixteenth-century Britain without attention to the impact these
translations had on the course of events, the directions of English and Scottish literature, and even the development of the English and Scots languages.  This seminar will use the 1526-34 New Testament of William Tyndale (1494-1536) as our primary text both for its considerable impact on the development of English prose style in the sixteenth century and because it served as the base text for a number of influential translations that followed it, including the 1611 King
James Bible.  While Tyndale’s translation will serve as our main course text, we will also consider the impact of the 1535 Coverdale Bible, the 1537 Matthew Bible, the 1539 Great Bible, the 1560 Geneva Bible, the 1568 Bishop’s Bible, and the 1582 Douai-Rheims New Testament translation into English of the Latin Vulgate.  Prospective students are particularly advised that this is neither a theology nor a religious studies course, and, as such, our purpose will be neither
to promote nor critique any belief system or philosophical stance. Rather, our concern is exclusively with the literary, cultural, and ideological impact these texts had upon English and Scottish literature in the sixteenth century, and we will structure our seminars accordingly.

English 4916 WA – Women and Cinema (B. Stolar)                     
This course will examine the intersections between film theory, feminist, gender, and ethnicity/race theories, paying close attention to female filmmakers’ explorations of the gaze and the representation of the (female) body.